Tuesday, November 13, 2012

PRICE OF FREEDOM No One Left Behind

A statement has been issued in the name of the IRA, claiming responsibility for the attack on a prison warder earlier this month.

The following statements were published in the Belfast-based Irish News this morning. ---------------------------------------------------------------------

"On Thursday, 1st of November, 2012, an active service unit of the IRA executed prison guard David Black.

"While the IRA never takes this type of action lightly, the IRA has a responsibility to protect and defend republican POWs.

"This action was in direct response to the torture and degradation of POWs held in Maghaberry.

"The issues that led to the IRA taking action might have been avoided if his 'superiors' had honoured the agreement they signed with prisoners in August 2010."

"Rather than showing the leadership necessary to resolve the protest in Maghaberry they continue to play politics with the lives of republican POWs and indeed their own guards and PCOs.

"Similarly, the charade of hypocritical condemnation from the local political classes does nothing to resolve the issues created by their inactions." * * *MI5 Political Internment Act of War British Occupied IrelandMarian Price is just one of several Irish people still interned in British Occupied Ireland for almost 18 months, during which time neither Marian or her lawyers have been allowed to see any of Britain's ‘alleged’ evidence against her.

• She has been kept in solitary confinement in a ‘male’ high security prison• She is effectively interned without a trial, sentence, or release date.• She has not been given any timescale for any investigation.• She has not been allowed to see the evidence that the state claims to have• Her release has been ordered on two occasions by judges. However, on both occasions the British Vice royal has overruled those decisions.• The Vice royal claims they ‘revoked Marian’s license, ’despite Marian never being released on license. She was given a Royal Pardon.• Marian’s Royal Pardon has ‘gone missing’ from the home office (the only time in history). The British Vice royal has taken the view that unless a paper copy can be located – it must be assumed that she does not have one. It is generally agreed that MI5 shredded her majesty's pardon.• Despite no ‘license’ existing for her release from prison in 1980, it is the non-existent licence that is being used to keep her in prison.• She can only be released by Theresa Villiers the current Vice royal responsible for Marian's internment.

The second last time Marian appeared in court, the charges against her were thrown out of court for lack of evidence by a Judge. Now the very same charges have been re-instated against Marian again in front of the very same Judge!

In secret courts, being introduced secretly, by the back door, through legislation in the House of Lords, MI5 the British secret service, push for secret trials to take place, with secret evidence by secret witnesses, that not even the defendant's lawyers are allowed to know or see. The length of sentence is secret with it all kept secret, under penalty of a long jail sentence, of their Official Secret's Act.

Despite protests of defence lawyers, the secret courts will operate, with virtually no rules of evidence, no discovery rules, no rules of decision and no rules regarding precedent. Not only will traditional law be in short supply, so too, will any sense, as to what interpretive practices would be followed by the 'judges' or what precedent values will exist.

In the constant existential crises, of the nonsensical British scum state, established on the basis of a British mentored sectarian headcount, with rules and ongoing lawlessness of farcical law, its obvious injustice, commands no respect from informed Irish citizens, with the exception of Her majesty's cultivated bigoted, sectarian, neo-colonial, commoners.

With indefinite internment without a fair trial, without formal charges, where counsel is uniformed, where an individual cannot have their day in open court, events such as the miscarriages of justice like the Guildford 4 and the Birmingham 6 will become the secret norm. Internees without trial are being secretly judged, by observers with a vested financial and political interest to infer guilt by often bigoted, prejudiced, sectarian, racist, blackmailed, intimidated bureaucrats of colonial perceptions.

The dehumanization of internees such as Marian Price, through the infliction of pain and torture, not only damages her body and mind, it is as Elaine Scarry wrote, world-destroying, "It is the intense pain that destroys a person‘s self and world, a destruction experienced spatially as either the contraction of the universe down to the immediate vicinity of the body or as the body swelling to fill the entire universe. Intense pain is also language destroying; as the content of one‘s world disintegrates, so the content of one‘s language disintegrates; as the self disintegrates, so that which would express and project the self is robbed of its source and its subject. Thus, physical erasure also eliminates the intelligible voice, reducing human speech to the primordial expression of pain, a state anterior to language."

In addition to these erasures of her body, mind and self, British torture achieves a third form of physical erasure by the very factof the political prisoners‘ torture, requiring concealment. The retreat of torture from respectability by European standards, means that the British must perform their brutality in hiding, primarily with censorship. However they also conceal their involvement in rendition, as they hide their activity in subcontracted assassinations, with more curtains over their already, shrouded victim's bodies such as several human rights lawyers liquidated in British Occupied Ireland

While in some instances, their prolonged stress positions along with other techniques, constituting cruel, inhuman, degrading treatment, may not always rise to the level of torture, they nevertheless were found guilty of such, by the International Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg regarding their activity in Ireland. The physical erasure of British torture is self-evident in their colonial history worldwide, right up to the present day and therefore needs only brief comment.

In secret British courts, with identity blacked out on their transcripts, judges will not countenance torture complaints, deeming this complaint conduct unacceptable and defendants will receive a final warning, oblivious to international law. In such courts they do not tolerate words, such as international law. The British are not concerned about international law and insist on it, by having internees like Marian Price, removed from the hearings, so that their secret services and military can consider classified evidence against her in secret.

If we accept the integrity of human rights law and its independence from any state sovereign, then it follows that there can never belawlessness such as there is in British Occupied Ireland, only gross violations of human rights law. Britain's current habeas-corpus-stripping provisions, are a core breach of human rights law. The many liberty concerns with regard to the Geneva Conventions and current British attempts at unilateral re-interpretation of sections of international law, have no constitutional basis whatsoever.

British Occupied Ireland with the treatment of political internees such as Marian Price, Martin Corey and many others, has become a human-rights-free zone.The quarantine of many Irish political prisoners is a familiar concealment. When placed in a human rights context. British Occupied Ireland is often described in terms of the British government‘s denial of rights to political prisoners but equally important the denial of their Irish humanity.

British Occupied Ireland has been a laboratory, of their systematic dehumanization, while they use their corporate right-wing media, such as the BBC world service, to refer to prisoners of conscience, as terrorists, to ostracize them from what it means to be human and allow the British continue the physical and mental maltreatment of Irish political prisoners, abhorrent to human beings.Thus they accomplish through cultural erasure, through the creation of the terrorist narrative; legal erasure and physical erasure through torture.

While the dimensions of dehumanization are distinct, they are interrelated. All are connected by law and specifically by human rights.The British have created the preconditions for state power activity, so brutal, as to deprive Irish political prisoners of the ability to be human or have any human rights. Irish political internees stand exposed to the violence of the British state, unmediated, unprotected by any human rights, reducing political internees to a state of bare life without humanity. The evolving normalization, is the Irish have no right, to have rights, a vacuum enabling extreme British state violence, placing the internment of internees such as Marian Price, at the center of a struggle not just for rights, but for humanity that includes you and me.

Through resistance, political space will open up but the mere resistance, the assertion of self against state violence, is in itself life-affirming. Resistance is a way of staying human. This, then, is the work that human rights do, when pushed to the brink of annihilation, they provide us with a rudimentary and perhaps inadequate tool to maintain our humanity. Thus by paying particular attention to the value of human rights and arguing the importance of rights, it becomes a mode of peaceful resistance, to British state violence. British internment is a military act of war on a defenceless civilian population, even their own beloved wartime Churchill called it and odious act of war in wartime.

It has been used in every decade in Ireland in the last century with political concentration camps with impunity, because the British ruling class regard and portray the Irish as subhuman. Indeed Irish political prisoners of conscience, currently live in subhuman conditions in British Occupied Ireland. Irish political prisoners pushed to the the edge of annihilation of their identity, have a long track record of participating in direct forms of resistance in many forms, including dirt strikes and hunger strikes, as a form of prisoner resistance, along with lawyer rights-based litigation and the hunger strikes, sharing an understanding of the relationship between rights, violence, and humanity.

While sometimes the resistance of lawyers and of prisoners may not be enough to win the prisoners‘ freedom as in the instance of dozens of Irish political prisoners who have died on hunger strike, it is still essential when British state violence is so extreme, as to attempt to extinguish our humanity and carry out this act of war on a defenceless civilian population that we explore every peaceful mode of resistance, besides fighting fire with fire. We have a moral obligation to consider all other alternatives first, that we fight fire with water and deny the British, with their barbaric acts of war on ordinary people, any basis for their inhumanity with their terrorist narrative.

Ordinary people too, who are genuinely interested in real peace in Ireland, have a responsibility to work for justice in Ireland, which is the only basis for a real lasting peace. Careerist politicians making millions off the backs of the long suffering Irish people make superficial careerist calls for peace, knowing full well is is hypocritical nonsense in an island of a divided Ireland, in more senses than one, planted firmly in social and political injustice of the extreme.

There is rally today, Saturday the 3rd of November in Dublin, starting at the Garden of Remembrance at 2.00 p.m, which goes to the historic GPO. That is a good start for anyone genuinely interested interested in Peace in Ireland and remove the basis of political violence. It would do well for those politicians engaged in state violence and acts of war against the Irish people of no property, to open their minds to this suggestion, rather than mouth vacuous, hypocritical condemnations for strictly political profit.